612bv3
July 25th, 2005, 03:13 AM
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/07/24/MNGFIDSS7D1.DTL
99 ways to get respect
Vote due this week on upgrade for busy Central Valley road
Michael Taylor, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, July 24, 2005
http://sfgate.com/c/pictures/2005/07/24/mn_hwy99-signemptyroad_mjm.jpg
http://sfgate.com/c/pictures/2005/07/24/mn_hwy99_52_mjm.jpg
http://sfgate.com/c/pictures/2005/07/24/mn_hwy99-truckoverturnd_mjm.jpg
http://sfgate.com/c/pictures/2005/07/24/mn_highway_99.jpg
Fairmead, Madera County -- It's lunch hour in the parking lot of the Mammoth Orange, an iconic hamburger place on Highway 99, the seen-better-days freeway that runs down the spine of the Central Valley. Just a few feet away, as the customers munch, cars and trucks thunder by at 75 mph.
"Noisy?" shouts Ira Stiggins, one of the Mammoth Orange's proprietors, as the waitresses around him scurry to bring cheeseburgers and drinks to truckers, tourists and other customers. "I don't hear it anymore."
Noise and hellish traffic are ever present on this section of Highway 99, an ancient artery that runs through farm country and a string of urban chokepoints from Sacramento south past Bakersfield. At times, the hot, wasted bleakness seems like something straight out of "The Road Warrior."
Countless 18-wheel tractor-trailer rigs bouncing over Highway 99's weathered surface have left their mark. Every half-mile or so, sometimes in the middle of the road, is the carcass of a tire. Occasionally, there's what looks like the carcass of a car. And here and there, thanks to a lack of interstate-style on-ramps and off-ramps, motorists trying to get from one side of the road to the other make mad dashes across high-speed traffic.
On this day, barely a mile down the freeway from the Mammoth Orange, a flipped-over cement truck sits on its side in the 100-degree heat, like a giant wounded pig, its underbelly exposed to the sun. Farther down the road toward Madera, someone eating a hamburger says, a truck has caught fire and is sitting by the side of the highway, flames shooting up.
Like Rodney Dangerfield, Highway 99 is the road that gets no respect. It is not part of the rich interstate system. It has none of the glamour of Highway 1, its scenic and curvy brother in the state road system. Highway 99, with its worn surface and frequently crowded lanes, is not even a speed heaven, like its newer neighbor to the west, Interstate 5.
But that's about to end, if a well-organized gaggle of legislators, nonprofit groups and others have their way. This coming week, members of a congressional conference committee will consider a provision in a $290 billion federal transportation bill that could start things looking up for old Highway 99.
The bill, if approved by Congress and signed by President Bush, would designate a 275-mile section of Highway 99 south of Sacramento as a "high- priority" federal road project, allowing it to join about 50 other roads around the nation that share $6 billion in highway improvement funds.
There is also an attempt to get that part of the freeway renamed as an interstate highway -- Interstate 7 is the current candidate -- making it eligible for more federal cash. The legislation is a joint effort by the nine members of the Central Valley's congressional delegation.
"Highway 99 is the lifeblood of the entire state," Rep. Devin Nunes, R- Tulare, said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C., pointing out that the Central Valley's agricultural output needs to "go to ports for export, and to major population centers."
All this, however, will take years to work out, Nunes said, and the current effort by Central Valley partisans to turn Highway 99 into a sparkling piece of wider and safer roadway is "just the first step in a very long process. It will have an impact in 15 to 20 years. This (legislation) is basically turning on the key."
To understand what Nunes and others are talking about, it's instructive to take a drive along Highway 99.
In the populated areas south of the state capital, the highway is crowded, almost up to its edges, by railroad causeways, housing developments, shopping centers and orchards. The tire carcasses are strewn about, and there are distracting vistas on either side -- the Turlock Auto Mall, the Meyenberg Goat Milk plant, a weathered steel roof bearing the almost legible words, "Mail Pouch."
Farther south, the encroaching developments and shopping centers give way to agricultural lands baking in the sun, stretching to the horizon -- flat, tan and green, thousands upon thousands of acres.
Occasionally, there are level crossings on the highway, openings that allow for cross traffic. Drivers wait for a brief break in the onrushing cars, dart across to the middle of the road, look the other way and then dart again, hoping to reach the other side before being blasted to oblivion by a big rig.
Shutting down these haphazard exits and entrances would be just one of several changes made possible with federal money, said Carol Whiteside, former mayor of Modesto and now president of Great Valley Center, a nonprofit public policy group that lobbies for improvements to the roadway.
Whiteside said the plan is to make the highway six lanes wide all the way from Stockton to Bakersfield; it's now four lanes in some places. There are also hopes of improving, and even in some cases creating, road shoulders.
In the larger scheme of things, though, Whiteside wants the rest of the country -- the tourists who flood California -- to understand (echoes of Rodney Dangerfield here) that this is California's main street and it's qualitatively different from I-5, I-80 or Highway 101. It represents a different kind of California than those places do.
"When Easterners think of California," Whiteside added, "they think of freeways, Hollywood and beaches; they don't often think of agricultural areas, farms, fresh produce. I love to tell people, 'When you guys are wearing your jackets at 10 p.m. in July in San Francisco, we're sitting by our swimming pools enjoying a glass of white wine.' Well, we do have a few yuppies in the Valley."
Yuppies aside, there's also the possibility that if Highway 99 isn't changed, it will "choke off economic development (of the Central Valley)," said Pete Weber, a former business executive who is now co-chair of the Regional Jobs Initiative in Fresno.
Weber says that back in the 1950s, when the Eisenhower administration was cranking up the interstate highway system, "Highway 99 met all the criteria specified by the system designers, but, for whatever reasons, it wasn't included in the system. Those of us who are proponents of the system think it's an omission that needs to be rectified."
Some parts of Highway 99 already meet interstate standards, but others don't. And there are some quaint aspects of the qualifying process.
Weber said one standard, still technically enforceable by the federal government, could probably be dispatched by a waiver. When the interstate system was created, the government required overpasses to be high enough for a Titan intercontinental ballistic missile to pass under. The Titan was phased out by the Strategic Air Command in 1987.
For now, California is working with the federal Department of Transportation to make things better but, as Nunes said, this isn't going to happen overnight.
State transportation officials have completed a "master plan" for the highway, said Sunne McPeak, head of California's Business, Transportation and Housing Agency, who has been negotiating with U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta over how and when the highway will be made better.
McPeak said the master plan will be converted to a business plan by the end of this year. Then, the state will spend most of 2006 in talks with Mineta's department.
"It just has to be safer and it has to be bigger," McPeak said of Highway 99. "That's why it's a priority."
Back at the Mammoth Orange, the Stiggins family is not quite sure what will happen if the highway gets widened. There's talk of the state fencing off what passes for an exit from the highway to the Orange parking lot.
Ira Stiggins said if that happens, "we're done for." Hungry diners would have to travel a few miles north or south, find a proper exit, cross the highway on an overpass and drive back to the Orange.
Mark DeSio, a spokesman for Caltrans, the agency that would do the highway work, said, "If I had a crystal ball, I don't see Caltrans cutting off a business by putting up a fence."
For now, the burger fans still roll in, chomping away while sitting at picnic tables near the big orange serving shed or in their cars.
Bob Busch, a 50-year-old truck driver from Phoenix, sat in the air- conditioned cab of his Peterbilt and explained why he takes Highway 99 on his weekly 750-mile journey hauling orange juice from Arizona to the Bay Area, instead of the smoother ride of I-5.
"There's more to see; it's a nicer ride," he said. "I-5 is just ugly desert. Besides, this is my favorite hamburger joint on the whole trip."
---------------------------------------------------------------
Down the road
-- Highway 99 was originally called "Legislative Route 4" and ran parallel to railroads running up through the Central Valley. Paving of Route 4 began in 1914. In 1926, it was designated U.S. 99, one of the first federal highways, and ran from Mexico to Canada.
-- In the 1960s, with the construction of Interstate 5 as the major north- south roadway in California, U.S. 99 was gradually decommissioned from the federal highway system and ultimately designated California Highway 99.
-- Fresno, which is on Highway 99 and has a population of more than 427, 000, is said to be the largest urban area in the United States without an interstate freeway running through or near it.
-- The section of Highway 99 under consideration for federal aid and renaming as an interstate runs about 275 miles, from Stockton to where Interstate 5 and Highway 99 join south of Bakersfield. Widening the entire section of freeway to at least three lanes in each direction would cost about $6 billion.
-- If Highway 99 becomes an interstate highway, it would probably be named Interstate 7. It cannot be renamed Interstate 99, because I-99 already exists in Pennsylvania.
-- If Highway 99 becomes an interstate, the existing overpasses would have to be raised to accommodate the bulk of an Air Force Titan ICBM missile, even though the missile was phased out nearly 20 years ago. Experts say, however, that provision could be waived.
99 ways to get respect
Vote due this week on upgrade for busy Central Valley road
Michael Taylor, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, July 24, 2005
http://sfgate.com/c/pictures/2005/07/24/mn_hwy99-signemptyroad_mjm.jpg
http://sfgate.com/c/pictures/2005/07/24/mn_hwy99_52_mjm.jpg
http://sfgate.com/c/pictures/2005/07/24/mn_hwy99-truckoverturnd_mjm.jpg
http://sfgate.com/c/pictures/2005/07/24/mn_highway_99.jpg
Fairmead, Madera County -- It's lunch hour in the parking lot of the Mammoth Orange, an iconic hamburger place on Highway 99, the seen-better-days freeway that runs down the spine of the Central Valley. Just a few feet away, as the customers munch, cars and trucks thunder by at 75 mph.
"Noisy?" shouts Ira Stiggins, one of the Mammoth Orange's proprietors, as the waitresses around him scurry to bring cheeseburgers and drinks to truckers, tourists and other customers. "I don't hear it anymore."
Noise and hellish traffic are ever present on this section of Highway 99, an ancient artery that runs through farm country and a string of urban chokepoints from Sacramento south past Bakersfield. At times, the hot, wasted bleakness seems like something straight out of "The Road Warrior."
Countless 18-wheel tractor-trailer rigs bouncing over Highway 99's weathered surface have left their mark. Every half-mile or so, sometimes in the middle of the road, is the carcass of a tire. Occasionally, there's what looks like the carcass of a car. And here and there, thanks to a lack of interstate-style on-ramps and off-ramps, motorists trying to get from one side of the road to the other make mad dashes across high-speed traffic.
On this day, barely a mile down the freeway from the Mammoth Orange, a flipped-over cement truck sits on its side in the 100-degree heat, like a giant wounded pig, its underbelly exposed to the sun. Farther down the road toward Madera, someone eating a hamburger says, a truck has caught fire and is sitting by the side of the highway, flames shooting up.
Like Rodney Dangerfield, Highway 99 is the road that gets no respect. It is not part of the rich interstate system. It has none of the glamour of Highway 1, its scenic and curvy brother in the state road system. Highway 99, with its worn surface and frequently crowded lanes, is not even a speed heaven, like its newer neighbor to the west, Interstate 5.
But that's about to end, if a well-organized gaggle of legislators, nonprofit groups and others have their way. This coming week, members of a congressional conference committee will consider a provision in a $290 billion federal transportation bill that could start things looking up for old Highway 99.
The bill, if approved by Congress and signed by President Bush, would designate a 275-mile section of Highway 99 south of Sacramento as a "high- priority" federal road project, allowing it to join about 50 other roads around the nation that share $6 billion in highway improvement funds.
There is also an attempt to get that part of the freeway renamed as an interstate highway -- Interstate 7 is the current candidate -- making it eligible for more federal cash. The legislation is a joint effort by the nine members of the Central Valley's congressional delegation.
"Highway 99 is the lifeblood of the entire state," Rep. Devin Nunes, R- Tulare, said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C., pointing out that the Central Valley's agricultural output needs to "go to ports for export, and to major population centers."
All this, however, will take years to work out, Nunes said, and the current effort by Central Valley partisans to turn Highway 99 into a sparkling piece of wider and safer roadway is "just the first step in a very long process. It will have an impact in 15 to 20 years. This (legislation) is basically turning on the key."
To understand what Nunes and others are talking about, it's instructive to take a drive along Highway 99.
In the populated areas south of the state capital, the highway is crowded, almost up to its edges, by railroad causeways, housing developments, shopping centers and orchards. The tire carcasses are strewn about, and there are distracting vistas on either side -- the Turlock Auto Mall, the Meyenberg Goat Milk plant, a weathered steel roof bearing the almost legible words, "Mail Pouch."
Farther south, the encroaching developments and shopping centers give way to agricultural lands baking in the sun, stretching to the horizon -- flat, tan and green, thousands upon thousands of acres.
Occasionally, there are level crossings on the highway, openings that allow for cross traffic. Drivers wait for a brief break in the onrushing cars, dart across to the middle of the road, look the other way and then dart again, hoping to reach the other side before being blasted to oblivion by a big rig.
Shutting down these haphazard exits and entrances would be just one of several changes made possible with federal money, said Carol Whiteside, former mayor of Modesto and now president of Great Valley Center, a nonprofit public policy group that lobbies for improvements to the roadway.
Whiteside said the plan is to make the highway six lanes wide all the way from Stockton to Bakersfield; it's now four lanes in some places. There are also hopes of improving, and even in some cases creating, road shoulders.
In the larger scheme of things, though, Whiteside wants the rest of the country -- the tourists who flood California -- to understand (echoes of Rodney Dangerfield here) that this is California's main street and it's qualitatively different from I-5, I-80 or Highway 101. It represents a different kind of California than those places do.
"When Easterners think of California," Whiteside added, "they think of freeways, Hollywood and beaches; they don't often think of agricultural areas, farms, fresh produce. I love to tell people, 'When you guys are wearing your jackets at 10 p.m. in July in San Francisco, we're sitting by our swimming pools enjoying a glass of white wine.' Well, we do have a few yuppies in the Valley."
Yuppies aside, there's also the possibility that if Highway 99 isn't changed, it will "choke off economic development (of the Central Valley)," said Pete Weber, a former business executive who is now co-chair of the Regional Jobs Initiative in Fresno.
Weber says that back in the 1950s, when the Eisenhower administration was cranking up the interstate highway system, "Highway 99 met all the criteria specified by the system designers, but, for whatever reasons, it wasn't included in the system. Those of us who are proponents of the system think it's an omission that needs to be rectified."
Some parts of Highway 99 already meet interstate standards, but others don't. And there are some quaint aspects of the qualifying process.
Weber said one standard, still technically enforceable by the federal government, could probably be dispatched by a waiver. When the interstate system was created, the government required overpasses to be high enough for a Titan intercontinental ballistic missile to pass under. The Titan was phased out by the Strategic Air Command in 1987.
For now, California is working with the federal Department of Transportation to make things better but, as Nunes said, this isn't going to happen overnight.
State transportation officials have completed a "master plan" for the highway, said Sunne McPeak, head of California's Business, Transportation and Housing Agency, who has been negotiating with U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta over how and when the highway will be made better.
McPeak said the master plan will be converted to a business plan by the end of this year. Then, the state will spend most of 2006 in talks with Mineta's department.
"It just has to be safer and it has to be bigger," McPeak said of Highway 99. "That's why it's a priority."
Back at the Mammoth Orange, the Stiggins family is not quite sure what will happen if the highway gets widened. There's talk of the state fencing off what passes for an exit from the highway to the Orange parking lot.
Ira Stiggins said if that happens, "we're done for." Hungry diners would have to travel a few miles north or south, find a proper exit, cross the highway on an overpass and drive back to the Orange.
Mark DeSio, a spokesman for Caltrans, the agency that would do the highway work, said, "If I had a crystal ball, I don't see Caltrans cutting off a business by putting up a fence."
For now, the burger fans still roll in, chomping away while sitting at picnic tables near the big orange serving shed or in their cars.
Bob Busch, a 50-year-old truck driver from Phoenix, sat in the air- conditioned cab of his Peterbilt and explained why he takes Highway 99 on his weekly 750-mile journey hauling orange juice from Arizona to the Bay Area, instead of the smoother ride of I-5.
"There's more to see; it's a nicer ride," he said. "I-5 is just ugly desert. Besides, this is my favorite hamburger joint on the whole trip."
---------------------------------------------------------------
Down the road
-- Highway 99 was originally called "Legislative Route 4" and ran parallel to railroads running up through the Central Valley. Paving of Route 4 began in 1914. In 1926, it was designated U.S. 99, one of the first federal highways, and ran from Mexico to Canada.
-- In the 1960s, with the construction of Interstate 5 as the major north- south roadway in California, U.S. 99 was gradually decommissioned from the federal highway system and ultimately designated California Highway 99.
-- Fresno, which is on Highway 99 and has a population of more than 427, 000, is said to be the largest urban area in the United States without an interstate freeway running through or near it.
-- The section of Highway 99 under consideration for federal aid and renaming as an interstate runs about 275 miles, from Stockton to where Interstate 5 and Highway 99 join south of Bakersfield. Widening the entire section of freeway to at least three lanes in each direction would cost about $6 billion.
-- If Highway 99 becomes an interstate highway, it would probably be named Interstate 7. It cannot be renamed Interstate 99, because I-99 already exists in Pennsylvania.
-- If Highway 99 becomes an interstate, the existing overpasses would have to be raised to accommodate the bulk of an Air Force Titan ICBM missile, even though the missile was phased out nearly 20 years ago. Experts say, however, that provision could be waived.